Neoliberal Geopolitical Order and Value: Queerness As Speculative Economy and Anti-Blackness as...

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Neoliberal Geopolitical Orderand ValueAnna M. Agathangeloua

a York University, S 653 Ross Building, 4700 KeeleStreet, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, CanadaPublished online: 17 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Anna M. Agathangelou (2013) Neoliberal GeopoliticalOrder and Value, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15:4, 453-476, DOI:10.1080/14616742.2013.841560

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Neol ibera l Geopol i t ica l Order and Value

QUEERNESS AS A SPECULATIVE ECONOMY AND ANTI-BLACKNESS ASTERROR

ANNA M. AGATHANGELOUYork University, Canada

Abstract -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Neo-imperial free-market capitalist shifts depend on animating slavery as terror, and

queerness as a speculative economy, to mediate political value conflicts and displace

antagonisms. I engage with two archives on queerness, a 2012 speech by Hillary

Clinton at the UN on African states’ violation of human rights of gays and lesbians, and

a report on the violation of human rights of Iraqi gays (2011). Through these archives, I

interrogate how slavery and queer economies are drawn upon by a resurgent neoliberalism

to constitute and erect regimes of value while generating structures of violence and gov-

ernance that impede our understanding of the emergence of fungibility as a modality of

slave terror. ‘The slave’ emerges as the suturing inert matter out of which epistemologies

and practices of economies of sexuality, race and geopolitics are harvested. Importantly,

‘the African’ is marked as black through lack of gay rights and ‘Africa’ in multiple sites is

figured as the a-historical scene out of which flesh is captured. I trace the ruptures in dis-

courses and corporeal practices presupposing that the existence of non-procreative sex as

foundational capacity threatens the reproduction of the global order and the fulfilment of

democratic promises while continuing the production of a structuring ontology that

requires blackness and the suffering of the slave, the extracted energy necessary to differ-

entiate and to suture queerness as a speculative economy.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keywordsslave, necropolitics, anti-blackness as terror, fungibility, value, global queer

INTRODUCTION

‘Death to the People of Lot’: this phrase appeared as graffiti in a Najaf neigh-bourhood in Iraq in 2009. As the Human Rights report entitled ‘“They Want Us

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2013

Vol. 15, No. 4, 453–476, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2013.841560

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Exterminated”: Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq’ (HumanRights Watch 2009) explains, this graffiti refers to ‘men who engage inhomosexual conduct, derived from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah’. Threeyears later, in December 2012, then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton –seeming to take non-Western acts of physical violence against gays and lesbianslike those encouraged by the Najaf graffiti as her evidence – emphasized at theUN that ‘gay rights’ is a foreign concept in parts of Africa and Asia and is aproblem in world politics.

These two illustrations share a common feature: sexuality and the redactingof race. Both raise the question of where sexual imaginaries produce queerness,both rely on a hermeneutic reading of the lived experience of a queer unfreesubject and both claim that subjects are their sex and that lived experienceof this sex disenables a detachment of subject and sexual experience. Basedon these phenomenological and only discursive understandings of queerpeople and queer lives, these archives are technologies that mark non-Western sovereign powers as failed states; importantly, states that supposedlylack the capacity to foster life by performing their rule-of-law obligations.During the queer phase, sovereign bodies matter more than ever: sovereign-worlding power is inconceivable without a legal and moral obligation toone’s queers as well as the larger international community’s queers.

Three moves enable this rendering of non-Western sovereign states as failedstates. First, there is a refusal to admit that sexual violence is not limited to partsof the non-Western world or to queers, displacing the fact that sexual violenceis a global politico-economic problem. It is the foundation of the emergingstructures. Assaults on queer, people of colour and black bodies come in theform of policing (i.e., terrorist laws, surveillance and killing) in multiplespaces. Second, there is a dismissal of how emerging geopolitical shifts andviolences often result from the reconfigured governance of capitalism(neoliberalism) that foregrounds an uneven distribution of the right to beas correlated with the right to legal and moral market values even when pol-itical leadership in multiple spaces argues that people of any orientationshould not be persecuted. Finally, there is a move to fetishize human rightsprotection discourses and practices, which are voiced as legal and ethicalresponses to failure of states, economies and families through a more gener-alized biopolitics that concerns itself with ‘the freedom of queers,’ all thewhile displacing the necropolitics that consolidate such freedoms andeconomic relations.

This essay tracks a range of often neglected politics, texts, policies, legal prac-tices, spaces and theories to reveal an emergent political body: the reconstructedsexual queer, whose recognizable humanity (i.e., imminent living-capacity) isconstituted into a recognizable sexual orientation and gender identity, part ofan emerging form of a sovereign body politic, which presupposes immanent(a Deleuzian outside) slave incapacity for suture (Dayan 2011). Concomitantly,this suffering fetishized ‘queer’ political body participates in the redaction andsubsequent sustenance of racialized structures with its recognizable sexual

454 International Feminist Journal of Pol i t ics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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orientation and gender identity, whereby white bodies become signifiers of‘legitimate’, radical alterity in the form of queerness and blacks are presumedimminently incapacious, never registering in the ‘legitimate’ global politicaleconomy of sex and sexuality (Agathangelou 2004) as well as law. I offer a peri-patetic presentation of the Human Rights Watch reports on Iraq (2011) andHillary Clinton’s speech to the UN to articulate their political positions,yoking them without collapsing them into comparison. In so doing, I suggestthat the three moves outlined above constitute not only the ‘straightjacketing’of sexuality, but also racial terror – where ‘gay rights’ becomes a discourseand a practice of (perceived) racial economic superiority and (actual) racial sub-ordination. Querying the genealogy of sex, neoliberalism and capitalism fromthe vantage point of black terror (i.e., lynchings, convict leasing to political dis-enfranchisement, chain gangs; see Morrison 1987; Dayan 2011) accords us anorientation from which to understand such ‘terror [that] allow[s] to demoniseothers . . . to do unspeakable things to them’ all in the name of ‘order’ (Dayan2011: 32–3) as well as the visions of radical justice emanating from anti-slavery and anti-colonial struggles. In the following sections, I theorize theways in which slavery becomes collapsed as sexuality into the neoliberal imper-ium within which blacks and black life serve as the literal raw materials to guar-antee long-term growth (Davis 2003: 94). I also point to insurgent social life as astruggle for ‘total freedom’ (Goddard 2006). In so doing, I work with two political(ethico-juridical) archives tracing their force on bodies directly. First, I reengagewith Hillary Clinton’s UN speech to trace how the queer is constituted as value ina speculative economy (i.e., the ‘rational’ basis for passing laws that integratethem as capacious civil subjects) that reconfigures capital and globality by dis-tinguishing between different forms of governance and violence, placing thequeer on the inside of the civil society and relegating the hovering blackoutside the ‘bounds of the civil’ (Dayan 2011: 22) consequently changing theworld itself and ‘all levels of social existence’ (Quijano 2000: 547). Second, Iuse the Human Rights Reports in Iraq to trace how sexual and racial technol-ogies are deployed, exposing how the suturing of a queer speculativeeconomy ‘here’ and ‘there’ depends fundamentally on ‘value’ as an abstractiondevice and a risk threshold that distinguishes between queers, racialized gays aswell as the structurally impossible and ontologically dead (i.e., blacks; seeAgathangelou 2009). Central to my analysis is the concept that queer economiescould not and do not escape being entangled with capital’s foundational terror.In fact, analysing these reports, I show the ways the neoliberal imperium biopo-litically constitutes and manages queer life while ignoring the wailing, thesounds of living death emitting from the chains and the screams from theslave ships of the Atlantic crossing and from places such as Attica, AbuGhraib and US prison states (Morrison 1987: 2010–11 cited in Childs 2009;Dayan 2011). I end with some thoughts on the possibility that queer projectsand the Black Struggle can contravene, noting how differentiations betweenbodies, sexualities, and races in world politics emerge as strategies that forecloseand suffocates a range of possibilities, globally constituted imaginaries and

----------------------------------------- Anna M. Agathangelou/Neol iberal Geopolit ical Order and Value 455

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freedoms all in the name of overcoming limits, such as death, stagnation and theloss of material value.

QUEERNESS: A SPECULATIVE ECONOMY

In an interview at Syracuse University, Hillary Clinton talks about ‘gay rights’as a foreign concept in parts of Africa and Asia. This follows a speech at the UNwhere she explicitly targets homophobia as a major problem in many parts ofthe Global South. She argues that the only way that certain nations canbecome democratic spaces is by eradicating violence against gays. While theUS story is also about slavery, racial wars and sex struggles, time has shownthat the US is on the ‘right side of history’; countries like India that are shiftingtowards decriminalizing sexuality are joining the US on the ‘right’ side.However, this is a far less linear narrative than Clinton suggests, in terms of‘slavery presence and slavery as the inert matter, the raw material thatsutures a globality “of reasonable consensus”’ (Dayan 2011: 22) and India’sdecriminalization of sexuality. Its materiality depends on the spread of neolib-eral regimes and the newer capital ventures to reconstitute spaces, currencies,resources, bodies and time (Mbembe 2012). This shift has come with the pushfor undiminished profits, but capital’s fundamental strategy, that is, drawingon terror to make money and betting on futures, can no longer be contained.The consequences of speculative practices that extend beyond what capitalsutures as its frontiers for the structural segregation of humans and towardthe production of value and wealth are coming daily to the fore. In thisforeign policy discourse, homosexual desire is articulated both as a legitimat-ing value relation and as a major force and site of speculation, as a commoditythat has not happened yet, or is only emerging as a possible global future, sep-arating productive from unproductive sexual relations, motherhood andmothering, legal and illegal practices, money and usury.

While the logic is not new, this discursive move comes at a moment whenthe state, unable to exercise a certain force and imperial leadership, is at acrossroads regarding its capacity to ensure life as a good. A variety of initiat-ives to secure the US dollar in place as the global reserve currency attest tothe continuing power of assumptions relating life and politics. A restruc-tured state, an oikos and sexual intimacy relations push the re-inscriptionof fundamentalist values, such as marriage equality, masculinity and white-ness as the grounds for imagining democracy. Now, gay spouses have thesame right to ‘receive the dignity and solace of an official notification ofnext of kin’ if their partner is killed in war (Associated Press 2013: 1), thusconnecting sex and death to race and (re)production and to a world appar-atus that stretches beyond the state and NGOs to public-private networksand corporations.

Roderick Ferguson offers a trajectory for thinking queer theory within theUS without analogizing it with blackness or ever using drawing on it as the


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raw material to suture the economies of anti-blackness (Agathangelou 2009).1

He argues that ‘women of colour feminism also invites us to consider how wemight reconsider the issue of sexuality’s deployment in an effort to assessqueer studies’ management of that category and to usher queer studies intoits full critical potential’ (Ferguson 2005: 86). At the same time, he problema-tizes the reproductive progress narrative: ‘Sexuality is not extraneous to othermodes of difference. Sexuality is intersectional. It is constitutive of and con-stituted by racialised gender and class formations’ (Ferguson 2005: 88). AsGumbs says:

A race-neutral (i.e., white) queer construction AND critique of the reproductivenarrative in the REPRODUCTION of the project of differential life valuethrough the criminalisation and targeting of racialised mothers . . . a queer ofcolour critique illuminates and queers the reproductive narrative throughwhich queer theory has constructed its genealogy. (2010: 3)

While dominant liberal progress narratives have articulated queer sex as anidentity separated from black women’s positionalities on axes of power,such as sexuality, race and family relations, it is ‘far less an identity than a pla-ceholder of that which is regarded as without value, inauthentic and – in itsspecifically capitalist [and worlding] sense – deemed unproductive or exces-sively so’ (Cooper and Mitropoulos 2009).

What connects and makes sex and race global, however, can also pullthem apart. Clinton separates sexual identity (as opposed to queerness)and slavery (as opposed to race). As implied by Clinton, LGBT refers to aradical rupture of sex from other placeholders of sexual value. Whileunproductive in an industrial sense, queerness as a figure, an idea and aneconomy is turned into a global placeholder of speculation. Clintonenacts a queer set of possibilities that are still timely, still necessary, craft-ing a blueprint for a lesbian and gay-friendly world. It is not enough thatthese future worlds constitute queer value; they ought to venture into inno-vation as well, and these ventures must be measures of fungibility: ‘Nothingis really qualitatively different. A cow, a car, and your cousin: each has itsshape and colour, but in the end it’s all the same, just stuff. It is all just bits,and all bits are equivalent’ (McKenzie 2009: 84). In highlighting fungibility,McKenzie (2009) allows us to read the generation of a network of asymme-trical relations and non-relations constituted by the formation of fungiblethings. Within this world matrix of fungibility, certain states and peoplehave the capacity to convert the instated valued queer into a novel signifi-cance recognizing it simultaneously as a moral good, legitimating the‘health’ of a leader-state, packaging it as a good to be sold for money(i.e., training sessions, corporate sponsorship and financial aid packages,creating jobs, self-enterprising subjects), while simultaneously requiringblack bodies to be bio-available and ‘infinitely penetrable’ (Gilroy 2000:127) objects of experimentation and sale. Given the centrality of fungibility


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to generating value under neoliberal capitalism (discussed later in thisarticle), Clinton’s move is strategically significant.

The commodification of the body is not a historical happenstance, but theresult of the naturalization of the violence that sets in motion the ‘law ofvalue’. This erasure of conditions under which value is generated (i.e.,family, inheritance, and lineage) depends also on disfiguring value’s forceon setting in motion the slave as the limit. This terror orders a hierarchy of‘value rest[ing] on an unlimited and always a soliciting groundlessness, agroundlessness marked, however, surreptitiously, by forms of violence’(Barrett 1999: 31). Engaging fungibility from the vantage point of the slavereveals the exorbitant terror of world politics and throws into sharp reliefthe limits of existing concepts of global political economy. Terror is theopening that enables value. To understand this, it is crucial to understandthe basis of global capital power as an anatomization and an archive of notjust marginalization and colonization, but also slavery, opening up thespace to think the reproduction process itself and its contingent methods ofconstituting sexual subjects and institutions from the position of thosewhose lives are non-value within this matrix. Fanon says: ‘Decolonisationwhich sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program ofcomplete disorder . . . it is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each otherby their very nature’ (1967: 41). He lays the groundwork for a theory of antag-onism ‘over and above a theory of conflict’ (Wilderson 2010: 75) betweenmasters and servants, as Hobbes would put it, thereby stretching debates ofexploitation, challenging fungibility based on labour’s value and production’sboundaries and a refusal to reproduce the differential uses of marked sexualbodies and slaves, therefore turning difference into value (i.e., profit)through violence and reproduction/mothering of a present that ‘kills’.

In Hillary Clinton’s speech, we see a move to foist the imperatives of a Westgay homogeny internationally. In deploying US gay and lesbian relations atthe level of world order she universalises what she thinks are sexual-state-capital revolutionizing relations. She proceeds to argue that those states thatdo not take seriously this revolutionazing of sexuality would not receive aidfrom the US. Talking at the UN, Clinton articulates the US bonds with otherstates of the world while also segregating the global into a network of discretecapacious and ‘rational’ units: those states that support LGBT rights and thosethat do not. In Clinton’s (2011) words:

This recognition [in the US] . . . evolved over time . . . Like being a woman, likebeing a racial, religious, tribal, or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not makeyou less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights and humanrights are gay rights.

Clinton (2011) articulates the US move from a slave-based society to a humanrights-based one when she says: ‘Likewise with slavery, what was oncejustified as sanctioned by God is now properly reviled as an unconscionable


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violation of human rights’. She draws on sex to (dis)articulate a trajectoryamong states: shifting from a slave-based society to a sexual human rightsone allows a state to progress. However, her discourse reveals multiplecrises in reproduction, the capture of the raw material for reconstructionsand the strategies to constitute anew the global order. Sex as a technologyof power ‘distribute[s] uncertainty and allocate[s] risk, that is both fractaland norm, the reproducible pattern of capitalist futurity’ (Mitropoulos2012: 1). Sex is also an intensified technology in that it defines spaces andsexual events through the reproduction of difference spatio-temporally. Itdraws on terror to capture black flesh and to suture the transmutation ofspeculative economies. Queer sex is articulated as the boundary beyondwhich nothing else exists in the economies of blackness deciphering itselfas a subject of capacity drawing on uncreated positions, black flesh for itsrecuperation. Importantly, it turns into value albeit in multiple forms (i.e.,embodying the notion of an enterprising self that is able to purchase andattract a mate or consume love, nutrients or even orgasms or resolve all pro-blems privately; Foucault 2008: 225) and speculates on the generation offuturity, pleasure and queer intimacies as redeemable value all the while cap-turing flesh and markets for profits. It is also being furnished with plausibleinfrastructures in the innovative transformation of capital; unhinged from aspatio-temporal persistence afforded by genealogical foundationalism, itmoves toward a seemingly infinite expansion or ‘generative complexity’(Mitropoulos 2012: 5).

Not coincidently, Clinton’s speech follows Uganda’s ‘Kill the Gays’ legis-lation supported by the American far right. In 2009, David Bahati, aUgandan politician and member of the ruling party, proposed ‘The Anti-Homosexuality Bill’ designed to ‘strengthen the nation’s capacity to dealwith internal and external threats to the traditional heterosexual family’ andto ‘protect the cherished culture of the people of Uganda, legal, religiousand traditional family values . . . against attempts of sexual rights activists toimpose their values of sexual promiscuity’ with ‘the offence of homosexuality’punishable by life imprisonment (Throckmorton 2009).

Drawing on human rights to open space for the rights of queers and forexpressions of queerness is crucial, but the intended universality of thehuman rights framework is haunted by an incapacity to agree internation-ally on basic terms (i.e., who deserves human rights and under what con-ditions). In fact, the discourse with which states support/do not supportthe rights of queers legitimates imperial preemptive strikes in the very com-position of intimacies, global order and understandings of life, terror anddeath. Clinton proposes gay rights as human rights and links them withhumanitarian aid. Yet, this move bolsters neoconservative projects and vio-lences: it ‘often increases the vulnerability of those in the Global South’ (waMutua 1996: 590), people of colour and those in the margins of the North.While human rights reinforce a phenomenal normativity as well as a specu-lative queer economy in some sites of Europe and the US, their operative


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presumptions do not immediately resonate with other intra- or outer-national politics and projects.

Sexually marginalized Africans have turned into problematic ‘collateraldamage’ (Kaoma 2012: 1) in the US geopolitical attempts to sustain itselfas the major leader of world politics, whereby US conservatives have rein-vented themselves as Africa’s best allies and the representatives of Chris-tianity. A turning point came in the late 1990s when the Christian Rightwas losing the fight over gay ordination in mainstream churches, includingthe global Anglican Communion. At the 1998 Lambeth Conference, a world-wide gathering of Anglican and Episcopal bishops discussed human sexu-ality and gay and lesbian ordination at length. Following the conference,right-wing American evangelicals encouraged African bishops to supporta suspension of the American Episcopal Church from the Anglican Commu-nion because it was gay-friendly and socially liberal. Such conjuncturesopened the door for major leaders of the Global North to discipline thecountries in question. On 17 August 2012, the Nigerian Senate – dominatedby conservative Christian and Muslim MPs – approved a bill to furthercriminalize homosexuality, using British PM Cameron’s threat to cut aidto rally public support and accusing the UK (the former colonial power)of interfering.

TRANSNATIONAL RACIAL SUBSIDIES: IRAQI GAYS

In February 2005, George W. Bush spoke to Arab governments, arguing forgood governance and promising development assistance for those who ‘rootout corruption, respect human rights, adhere to the rule of law and investin their people by improving health care systems and schools’ (Bush 2005).These statements coincided with attempts to re-make a New World StraightOrder ‘with a shift towards substantive liberal norms to do with democraticentitlement, good governance and the responsibility of states’ (Dunne 2009:110). In addition to speculative economies, the preservation of pax Americanaamidst shifting geopolitical-power-security-complexes and emerging powersand forces required changes in America’s national security and reconstructioninstitutions; accordingly, the US National Security Strategy declared it ‘timeto reaffirm the essential role of American military strength’ (Bush 2005:25). By articulating the ‘American security perimeter . . . as far into thefuture as possible’ (Kagan, Schmitt and Donnelly 2000), the strategywent beyond articulating a desire for traditional geopolitical security stabilityto voice America’s desire for a specific type of a family unit, inheritance andlineage relations to be secured as well.

Unlike Bush who focused on normative heterosexual projects, and like Clin-ton’s speech about fundamentalist Africans being sexually backward, therecent UN Report on Human Rights in Iraq focuses on the violence againstgays and lesbians, saying that even with the new constitution, the ‘human


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rights situation . . . remains fragile as the country continues its transition fromyears of dictatorship, conflict and violence, to peace and democracy’ (2011: 1).It adds: ‘members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) com-munity usually keep their sexual orientation secret and live in constant fearof discrimination, rejection by family members, social exclusion, intimidationand violence’ in Iraq (Report on Human Rights in Iraq 2011: 33). The Reporthighlights the need to eliminate attacks on LGBT peoples as a major step inthe transition of Iraq into a legitimate global (i.e., worlding) actor and labelscontinued attacks on LGBT people as a barrier to Iraq’s membership in theglobal political community.

In the UN Report on Human Rights, ‘the gay’ is articulated by contrasting theUS and Iraq. The US is presumed to be a land of economic opportunities and thespace within which queers can convert ‘infinite debt into endless credit, and[also] break with the capitalist limits on speculation’ (Mitropoulos 2012: 23).Neoliberal queer freedom is articulated as another pricing and investment mech-anism in entrepreneurial populations that seek out to sunder apart risks andlimits. Accordingly, in Iraq, ‘queer’ emerges as a revolutionary and an ethicalpractice that disrupts patriarchy and tribalization (i.e., racialization) and‘removes irrational distortions’ from inflated national budgets (Davidson 2013:3). However, the violence in Iraq (i.e., from the war, terrorists attacks andattacks against queers) disrupts the US binary opposition of the postcolonialeconomy and US capitalism. In the reconstruction projects in Iraq, entrepreneurs,who prioritize the transactional ontology of human life, draw on race as a tech-nology of genocide. The US animates its source of global power, the military’spure force, polemos, to make the looting possible while simultaneously it re-ani-mates moralistic arguments that fuel fundamentalist understandings and asym-metrical segregations of sex, race and anti-blackness.

In this way, the US focus on the killing of gays in Iraq serves to police theOrientalized Other of ‘Muslim sexuality’ (Puar 2011). At its base, this sexualitymust be inherently different from the neoliberal and dominant speculativequeerness (voiced by Clinton) practiced in the US in order to organize anuneven distribution of rights based on sex. Hence, in this way, the ‘queer’ ofIraq can turn into a sexual/racial subsidy (i.e., the matter) that can be used tostructurally adjust global speculations. In this discourse, queer freedomdivides the world into chaotic spaces, where violence and capture can happenwith impunity; it legitimates the creation of sovereign spaces, where‘Muslims’ separate the non-manly from the manly to kill them (Report onHuman Rights 2011: 2). While the prosperity promised by decreased state invol-vement and increased open markets has been linked to the spread of gay rightsas human rights, the idea of infinite openness to secure profits translates as theright to intervene to protect and infinitely restructure this order and its multipleglobal actors by inserting market rule and the ‘right to police’ and segregateracialized sexualities and bodies, racialized sexualities from blackness.

The value accorded to the queers at the UN are violent moves that evacuatequeerness, that is, the evacuate queerness that is, removing simultaneously


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the collective and social accountability and generating a structure for the gaycommunity to self-enterprise by privately and individually managing illness,poverty and discrimination. These US ‘coming out’ speeches highlight theways queer subjects are being valorized. In this, emerging international sexualpower conflicts over land, resources and racial subsidies in the form of valueare reduced to questions of re/productive stabilities and allegiances. Such afocus though displaces the very suture and disjuncture between sex andvalue: how do sex and value suture/diverge relationality when the conceptual-izations and practices of both are at stake? As if in response, the Report onHuman Rights continues: ‘The Mahdi Army, striving to rebuild its reputationafter this prolonged absence, sought to rehabilitate itself by appearing as anagent of social cleansing. It exploited morality for opportunistic purposes’(2011: 3–7). Not surprisingly, the Report appeared when ‘Africa’ (often an undif-ferentiated inert matter) was being reprimanded for violations of gay rights.

In its Report, the UN (and the US) regulate racial understandings of certaingeopolitical positions as backward and non-existent (i.e., not registeringstructurally). Perhaps the killing of gays in Iraq gestures to an invocationof queerness that cannot be separated from Islam and Islamic law, fromthe killing of Hussein and the Iraq invasion, from the imperial colonizationof the US since 2003. Still, as the Report reveals, Muslim anti-gay doctrines,Western security doctrines, unspecific provisions in the criminal code andactors such as militias and ‘secular’ courts are often at odds, yet they con-verge on the issue of sex enlisted to restrict freedoms of expression, associ-ation and assembly. The result is a rejuvenation and legitimation of acollapsing of sex and race and a legitimation of sex as a racial subsidy inthe war between life (i.e., global subject always imagined as white), inertmatter (blacks as dead) and matter (i.e., racialized subjects such as Iraqis),whereby the market becomes an overseeing entrepreneurial sex and racialsecurity force delineating thresholds and wars (i.e., conflicts amonghumans and their legitimate sexualities) and slaughtering (i.e., antagonisms,where humans can use terror with impunity on flesh and inert matter tosuture queerness as freedom). Thus, while consensual homosexual conductbetween adults is not a crime under the 1969 Iraqi Criminal Code, policeand prosecutors use the law to punish and/or allow the militias to kill ortorture gays and lesbians.

A call for protecting queers in ‘conflict zones’ implies a newly available con-ception of homosexuality as the monopoly identity of a small and relativelyfixed group of people, distinct from an earlier view of same-sex desire’sglobal matrix of power. Thus, the question remains: where do queersbecome available for contestation about global power as expressed in Clinton’sspeech above or, in the language of morality, in need of being ‘saved’? I arguethat this racialized ‘disciplining’ of the homosexual is both problematic and astrategy of extracting more value, a ‘realisation’ of an ethical universality andinnovation in its sundering from and cleansing of sexual/slavery productivity.The next section theorizes the ways dominant powers argue for queerness


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becoming a strategy to leverage and thereby sustain in place slavery in thename of the ‘need’ of ‘the West’ to save ‘the queer’ from ‘the black.’

ANATOMIZATION OF VALUE AS TERROR IN ECONOMIES OFBLACKNESS: SLAVERY AND QUEERNESS

Stephen Dillon provides a theoretical framework to start this analysis,asking: ‘If slavery’s anti-black technologies inhabit and structure theprison, how do they live in the operations of the market?’ (Dillon 2012:114). His article suggests that the emerging international discourse on ‘gayrights’ and its displacement in Africa and blacks is a bar on the prison ofblackness as well as a technology of slavery. Dillon considers ‘how the necro-politics of slavery inhabit and drive the biopolitics of neoliberalism’ (2012:115) even in the governance of historically marginalized subjects (i.e.,gays and lesbians, immigrants, aboriginal peoples). I contend that the (disci-plined) queer is a newer technology in world politics, where a promotion of aspecific notion of ‘the queer’ (i.e., among those subjects who possess acapacity and a will to become self-enterprising subjects, indeed their ownbrand), along with the protection of that queer, is being used to further a nar-rative of the superiority of US law as an international ‘white dog’ (Dayan2011), white supremacy, neoliberal democracy and imperialism by rupturingblack life. In this view, slavery is the condition of economies of blackness(i.e., it is blackness) as openness to gratuitous terror. The terror that bothmakes blacks and is enacted upon blackness in the afterlife of the historicalinstitution of slavery is a ‘rupturing of the flesh, the evacuation of the blackpsyche, the practice of empathic identification and an acknowledgment thatblackness is only made visible through a discourse and narrative afforded apositioning within civil society (such as queerness)’ (Pak 2012: xiv). Pak’sanalytical intervention enables us to recognize the ways that transatlanticslavery constituted blackness as outside sexual civil society relations andoutside of sovereign sexual protection is in the ‘now’ (The Smiths 1984) –therefore – this is what also makes possible the segregation of sex fromrace and the practice of sex as terror. While the slave has no-value as abeing, a body and sexually, it is also a ‘usable and utilized assignation’(Barrett 1999: 207). The institution of slavery instantiates itself in the subor-dination, torture and terror of blackness in the worlding of (i.e., global andlocal) politics global (and local) politics (see Dillon 2012: 121) in the ‘now’rather than in some vague and atemporal historical imaginary.

Conjuncting the temporal structures of blackness and queerness is my wayof considering them as thinking zones, where politico-economic and eroticclaims about insurgent sensualities as everyday expressions and performativedeclarations of what we are and where we live our lives are articulated. Byglobal ‘insurgent sensualities’ I mean those queerest (i.e., blackness uncon-tained) sexualities (uncontained) that do not use their energies in transforming


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the fact of terror into value and a mode through which to reproduce a deadlystructure (Lorde 1997: 55; Sharpe 2010). In the words of Lorde (1981: 39):

For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutionaldehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as una-voidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel tothought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived.As poets.

Instead, these poets’ insurgent sensualities or what Sharpe calls ‘monstrousintimacies’ rupture the ‘pure’ narrative of (white), heterosexual, reproductivesexualities serving (if sometimes nonchalantly) both a Darwinian mission of‘natural selection’ and a Christian directive of marital sexuality as reproduc-tive.

In the narrative wherein an imperial global structure of white supremacyprotects ‘the gays’ from ‘the blacks’, insurgent sensualities are robbed oftheir content as radical alterities and expressions and deployed as tools ofimperium. Moten describes these tools of crisis as an ‘infinite rehearsal of gen-erative capacity’ within ‘the open field of a generative grammar . . . whichreveal[s] the sclerotic constraints . . . fostered by an empiricist attitude whosestructuring force . . . can be traced back to a certain valorisation of the grasp’(Moten 2011: 2). A crisis of ‘gay rights’, like other ‘human rights’ and ‘democ-racy’ crises before them, holds in Marx’s account an ‘occult ability to add valueto itself’ (see Marx 1976: 255). Indeed, these crises or negotiations which arethemselves undertaken at the points of difference (e.g., queers vs. blacks,queers vs. heterosexual Africans, slaves vs. gays and lesbians, queers vs.gays and lesbians, queers as beings vs. blacks as non-beings), are relays thatresult in the suturing and coherence of international structures and worldingprojects. As such, far from being disassociated from the global crisis of capit-alism, these pro-‘gay rights’ discourses and the neoliberal straightjacket ofsexuality turns into the location of that global crisis of capitalism. It is amulti-layered violence: of sexuality as disciplined, of blackness as seeminglysexually repressive and of the two combined as a first-order (selling sexuality)and second-order (signifier of market merit) market force.

Yet, as Barrett points out, this visible multi-layered global crisis is an‘attempt to eclipse’ another crisis by suturing terror as value; this ‘duplicitousstructure or movement of value can be imagined as the staging of two separate,but only glancingly separate, appearances – “value as force” and “value asform”’ (Barrett 1999: 30). Within this hierarchy, ‘value as force is underprivi-leged to the promiscuous value as form’ (Barrett 1999: 32). This same logicapplies in the ‘now’, valorizing queerness along with other kinds of subjectsas privileged and a-sexual blackness as the underprivileged term of no-value, all the while ‘secreting’ and making unthinkable the terror that drawson flesh suturing value2 while also generating economies of blackness. Enga-ging the locus of slavery or blackness, the formation and ongoing production


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of a global sexual existence as value highlights the emergence of a social con-tract with restructured boundaries and reconfigured sutured value throughterror.

In order to trace how slavery and anti-blackness are deployed and leveragedin world politics by dominant states like the US and corporations all in thename of radicalness (i.e., read capital’s moves to generate more value and infi-nitely and with no constraints) and productions of venture power, I draw onFoucault’s critique of the logics of bio-power as service (Foucault 2004: 16),that is, ways different institutional powers decide who may live or die, includ-ing the ways people can be brought into the market sexually: first, by assertingtheir right to capacity as working subjects and second, ‘through the intermedi-ary of health’ (Foucault 2004: 16) as ‘queer value’ (Wesling 2012: 107). Whilethe marketing of sexuality has previously been analyzed as concerns of humantrafficking, prostitution, pornography and other illicit economies, I suggestthat the neoliberal imperium’s deployment of ‘gay rights’ is marketizing sexu-ality as a human right rather than positing it as radical erotic connections andrelations. I also engage Rose’s idea of biosocialities as ‘collectivities formedaround a biological conception of a shared identity’ (Rose 2007: 134) thatmake an emergent sexual vitality central to power.

In this world, ‘proper’ treatment of the (definable) queer is an indicator ofmarket viability and political worth and a homonormative notion of ‘gayrights’ emerges ‘as a single-issue and race-free mode of difference’ (Ferguson2012). This produces what I call a queer service sexual capacity – if you will, a‘proper place’ for (i.e., read white) queers in the neoliberal imperium’s sense of‘self’ and mode of operation, which simultaneously disciplines and points out(perceived) inadequacy and inferiority on the part of the imperium’s (racia-lized) others, all the while displacing the terror and antagonism that makespossible again and again an imperial order whose foundational conditionsare anti-blackness and suffering and its reproductive/reconstructive practicesare possible through the slaughtering of blacks. This generates, in Wesling’saccount (2012), a particular (homonormative) ‘queer value’ turning rawsexual energies into attributes (i.e., homo intimacies as anti-identities with auniversalizing venturist impulse) and subjects (i.e., liberal equality, recog-nition and inclusion). Seeing sexual capacity as queer value ‘sutures togethertwo domains too often understood to operate autonomously: the psychic realmof desire and the material realm of accumulation and exchange’ (Wesling2012: 107). As a technology, ‘the affectively necessary work of queer desire. . . both demands and enables a vision of the indeterminacy of value’(Wesling 2012: 122) making possible states and markets yielding valuethrough slavery and colonization evading at the same time the worlding ofBlack struggle erotic energies. This dynamic leverages state and corporatepower in global networks to criminalize homosexuality, standardize familyformations and continue military occupations, thereby evading its imperialand white supremacist politics in the flows of global exchange.


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Spivak provides us the conceptual tools to think through a link between thepolitics of ‘queer value’ and its commodification, not only in service of gov-ernmentality but also of market capitalism when she suggests that value ‘isalways necessary in order to move from labor to commodity’ and causes acrisis of capitalism when it is intertwined with the generation of difference(Spivak 1988: 164). As discussed above, such a generation of value (a particu-lar disciplined notion of queerness) and a generation of difference (how queers‘should’ be treated) become serial invocations and designations of crisis,marking continued resistance to those dominated and displaced by such inno-vative moves. Sixty American corporations submitted an ‘amicus brief in thelandmark Hollingsworth v. Perry case’ in which they recognized that ‘the rightsof same-sex couples to marry is more than a constitutional issue. It is abusiness imperative’ (Parloff 2013: 1).

However, as Sunder Rajan notes, the ‘genesis of crisis is residing in the valueform itself as it gets appropriated by logics of capital (so that logics of capitalthemselves come to define what value means)’ (Sunder Rajan 2012: 342). It isin the midst of this apparently infinite (re)generative crisis, where ‘those of ustrying to live in a different way’ seek to orient our ‘regenerative sources ofinsurgent social life’ by considering ‘blackness as a matter for thought, aswell as the object of a politico-erotic claim’ (Moten 2011). Here, ‘blacknessuncontained’ becomes ‘the queerest, scariest thing ever. The threat and thepotential of a rival production of Black subjectivity is so dangerous that itmakes your skin crawl’ (Gumbs 2010: 418).

REGENERATIVE SOURCES OF INSURGENT SOCIAL LIFE?

Looking for a path out of this violence starts with Foucauldian biopolitics.Foucault characterizes contemporary governance as a ‘somatocracy’ which‘sees the care of the body, corporeal health, the relation between illness andhealth, etc., as appropriate areas of state intervention’ (Foucault 2004: 7).This shift to ‘somatocracy’ reflects the evolution of a political belief thatpeople’s bodies must be attended to because the institutions of states andmarkets will fail them. Bodies become primarily things which should notsuffer, rather than things which desire – a value set in line with capitalistfuturity and a Westernized notion of human rights and the responsibility toprotect (R2P) (Mitropoulos 2012: 2). Queer economies once fell outside ofthis ‘somatocracy’ as ‘the excessive pleasure that does not result in productiveissue’ (Mitropoulos 2012: 2), but are now co-opted into discourses of law,necessity, legitimacy, rights and protection.

Particularly, the need of ‘the West’ to segregate the queers from slaves in theinternational discourses of Hillary Clinton and Human Rights Watch is whatFoucault calls a ‘monarchy of sex’ (Foucault 1996: 214). Clinton prioritizessex over and above any other axis of power in the distribution of globalpower. To summarize, this anatomization of the objectification of value as


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monarchy of sex eclipses though the existence of the politics of queer blackimpossibility, whereby one cannot be both queer and black since black is bydefinition a threat to the new ‘queer’ (i.e., the accumulation of privileges inthe neoliberal imperium) and therefore ‘queer blacks’ are presumed non-value, dead or impossible.

Foucault contends that the way to topple a ‘monarchy of sex’ is to pryapart the link where sex and truth conjoin. Winnubst notes that the nexusfor that conjunction (and, therefore, for its destruction) is the production ofa ‘non-normative social rationality’, where the ‘singular barometer of . . .economic calculation [is] fungibility’ (Winnubst 2012: 81, 92). Fungibility, acentral principle in economics, ‘implies that any unit of money is substitutablefor another’ (Abeler and Marklein 2008: 1).

The neoliberal imperium draws on fungibility as its major principle of order-ing subjects, characterizing ‘the worker’ (and, thereby, ‘the self’) as an enter-prise to be invested in (with nutrition, education, training and affection) andto discover new inventions as well (by endeavouring to produce surplusvalue) (Foucault 2008: 225). Winnubst argues: ‘Neoliberalism [is] the formalis-ing of social relations and difference into fungible units . . . inequality is essen-tial to stimulating market competition . . . [it] must be intensified andmultiplied until the social fabric becomes a conglomeration of diffuse, fungi-ble differences’ (2012: 93–4). In this view, sex becomes not sex, but a tool ofsocial relations and difference to be operated on and deployed by markets – an‘erasure of history’ of the sexuality (and pleasure) of sex (Winnubst 2012: 95).This argument becomes the foundation for a critique of the neoliberal orderbased on fungibility, where ‘sexuality and sexual pleasures [appear] as exem-plars of non-fungible limits to the enterprising rationality of neoliberalism’(Winnubst 2012: 97).

While sexual pleasure betrays the myth of fungibility, however, a critique ofthe current neoliberal order cannot stop here – it must also show the ways inwhich the myth of fungibility invisibilizes racialized and sexualized violencesand pits ‘sexual freedom’ (which is, of course, not at all free) against thoseoutside the limits, ‘the uncreated source of creation’ (Bourdieu cited inBarrett 1999: 29), of white supremacy’s power and legal protections. It is notonly ‘the worker’ and his/her/its ‘sexuality’ that are fungible; racialization isalso employed as a signification of inferiority, colonization, the capitalistunderclass and the lawless. Winnubst characterizes this as yet another of ‘neo-liberalism’s structurally damaging effects’ (2012: 97). In this view, the world isfacing imminent ‘rupture’ that comes from a major tension in capital’s infinitedesire to expand everywhere, anywhere, and all the time all the while reassert-ing limits by articulating that its crises – sexual and otherwise – can be trans-cended through institutional and moral changes.

Rhetorical focus on institutions and morality evades the penetration of fron-tiers to constitute, capture and kill new spaces, sex and flesh for reconstruc-tions and profit. Capital regimes require new forms of subjugation,centralizing sex and gendered technologies while sapping their erotic energies,


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capacities and life sources. Yet, any attempt to query this neoliberal imper-ium’s series of events, discussions, and pushes from the vantage point of black-ness (in Sexton’s words, ‘blackness as theory’) reveals an anatomization offungibility and accumulation as terror foundational to capitalist formations.More so, drawing on blackness as the analytical lens allows us to see the sys-tematic ways that the generation of value is terror even when its ineluctableviolence is sublimated by fetishizing boundaries (i.e., between queerness andrace) all the while denying ‘the original mechanism [terror and direct force]by means of which valuation initiates’ (Barrett 1999: 28) as blackness andwith ‘flesh’. In conversation with Barrett and Sexton, I argue that the pathto understanding sexuality as a commodification, as a resource of value andas an enslavement technology of blackness can provide a route to understand-ing the ‘insurgent social life’ as radical orientations that challenge and rup-tures the neoliberal and white supremacist imperium’s reproductive andgenerative approaches that embrace inheritance and trasubstantiation ofdeath into heritage. To that end, I ask where (and how) does the generationof value in the form of queer sexual service capacity emerge? What is itsvalue (if any) in the reproduction of a racialized global political order whosefundament is slaughter? What are the subjects, objects, the inert matter andprocesses that the order relies on for its reconstructions?

QUEERNESS, RACIAL SUBSIDIES AND THE SLAVE OF THE SHIFTINGSEXUAL GLOBAL ORDER

Finding the answers to these questions for Foucault requires replacing the cri-tique of capitalism with a critique of sexuality. According to Foucault, becausesex is incompatible with a ‘general and intensive work imperative’, capitalshifts its terms of work (Foucault 1990: 6). In turn, it modulates itself as a glo-balizing and liberalizing set of forces while continuing to organize labour,bodies and capacities. Shifts of reproduction are modulated by shifts ofvalue, whereby the new subjects now determine all social values throughthe fundamental myth of capitalism, fungibility (Winnubst 2012: 92).

The fungibility of sexuality is only one of the terror technologies of blackfungibility. Hartman details how slavery has stolen the lives of blacks byarticulating ‘the fungibility of the commodity’ (Hartman 1997: 7). Unlike Win-nubst, she argues that this fungibility in the case of the black body has neverbeen a relation, let alone a formal relation, of equity of uncertainty: a (non)-relation, it ‘makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerableto the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires and values’ (Hartman1997: 21). Problematizing the idea that the slave population and blackbodies are ‘offered up as surrogate selves for meditation on problems ofhuman freedom, its lure and its elusiveness’ (Morrison 1993: 27), Hartman’stheory provides us with the conceptual insights to articulate a theory thattakes black corporeality as the locus of understanding the formation of


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sexual-global-existence with fungibility (as terror) as its fundament. For her,the position of slavery ruptures a presupposition of a social sexual contractpromising protection from terror. Hartman posits that blackness is a socialdeath presuming the slave an impossible body that is, having no position orcapacity in the multiple-sexual-value-making-projects’ circuits. Further,such a violent (dis)placement is fundamental to the suturing and maintenanceof interstate sovereign structures and civil society and the ways these relationscome to constitute multiple value making ‘global’ (i.e., worlding) projects areuneven. The distinction between the slave and black is an ontological andparadigmatic misnomer; the condition of slavery is marked by direct forceand slavery (and thus, blackness) is defined through gratuitous terror (fung-ibility otherwise). The violence enacted upon ‘Africans’ in slavery rupturesthe flesh and evacuates the black psyche through social death (Hartman2007: 136). Such a definition challenges the popular idea that blackness orslavery is a narrative of an ‘amputated past’ (Dillon 2012: 120), based on anallegory, an outdated institution, an identity issue or a phenomenologicalanthropology. It is a condition, a terror, sutured in all institutions; it is inthe ’now’.

The call to protect the queer from Africans by ‘the West’ in Clinton’s speechand the queer from the savage Muslim in the Human Rights Report, then, is aviolence that orders the world, constituting competing formations of value inthese projects, while sublimating the empire’s ineluctable terrorization ofblackness by analogizing3 (a major strategy of the redistribution of globaland sexual power) the suffering of slaves with that of queers, the colonizedsubjects and queers, the US and Africa. In the normalizing discourse of thisdouble move, the pursuit of desire in the present must be postponed for thesake of a putative future expressed in the institution of reproduction. Aqueer futurity, predicated on choice, must necessarily undermine the symbolicorder of civil society. Edelman urges us to accept queerness as inauthentic,insubstantive, a ‘structural position’ working to undermine identities promisedthrough the advancement of futurism. As such, ‘queerness can never bedescribed in the language of progression – of "being or becoming" – butmust be elucidated in the materiality of the body: queerness embodies’(Edelman 2004 cited in Pak 2012: 172). In this view, queerness is ‘the siteoutside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value ofreproductive futurism . . . queerness . . . figures outside and beyond its politicalsymptoms, the place of the social order’s death drive’ (Edelman 2004: 3emphasis mine).

Yet, the psychic space of queerness that Edelman imagines is constituted bythe conditions of a sovereign power and the displacement of violence ontoqueers of colour, people of colour, queer blacks and blacks, who are not oneand the same in the unfolding of global power and capital formation. There-fore, while Edelman’s view escapes the rights discourse that plagues Clinton’sspeech and the Human Rights Report, it is challenged by Afro-pessimists andothers who suggest that such formations and understandings of queer


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subjectivity are a key condition of possibility of queerness in the neoliberalsocial order (Keeling 2009: 568).

In this view, queer futurity remains imbued with the condition of subjectiv-ity as a source of speculation and the accumulation of value. The ontology ofAfrica and blackness is such that the world pivots on the order of anti-blackness penetrating with impunity. By this I mean that the non-existenceof blackness (understood as inert matter) is precisely what makes the rest ofthe world legible; the non-radicalness of Africans (‘proved’ by ‘gay rights’failures or some other way) is the foil against which ‘the West’ and whitesmeasure their legitimacy and value. Mbembe comments: ‘It is in relation toAfrica that the notion of absolute "otherness" has been taken farthest’ (Mbembe2001: 2). Africa not only ‘stands out as the supreme receptacle of the West’sobsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of “absence”, “lack” and“non-being” of identity and difference’ (Mbembe 2001: 4); it has also beenconsigned:

To a special unreality such that the continent becomes the very figure of what isnull, abolished, and, in its essence, in opposition to what is: the very expressionof that nothing whose special feature is to be nothing at all. (Mbembe 2001: 4)

Against this order of compulsive value, I contend that a queer future, no matterhow despondent, is one which is still possible, perhaps not equitable, but avail-able nonetheless, to ‘the queer’. In this theorization the speculative encounteris the symbolic creation of the subject marked by gender and sexualized differ-ence. This interpretation stretches dominant understandings of moribund neo-liberal capitalism and ‘radical’ theories of queerness to argue that the slave,disfigured in the world order, is the inert matter that relays the emergenceof a subject with different kinds of properties and legal capacities includinggay/lesbian/queer sexuality (see Ferguson 2004).

Moribund capitalist white colonial and slave supremacy formation draws onqueerness to stake out its possibility and generate profits for the new emergingimperial markets. The bodies and consequently, the sexual organs of the racialother are the sites of exchange and other ventures making possible the bettingon the future price of difference and desire in markets; these could be gay mar-riage and transgressive intimacies, to pick two speculative assets centralized inthe current US debates, but blackness still only amounts to no signs of relation-ality either in the form of reproduction or property. To borrow from Sexton,‘racial difference issues from direct relations of force – the scales of coercion– and it is only elaborated or institutionalised within relations of power – thescales of consent’ (Sexton 2008: 9). Both libidinal and global economies’sexual expression is ordered as a form of value. Sexuality’s function as asite of conflict, as it becomes animated by value, is to establish bordersbetween different kinds of sexualities and the order and hierarchy of theirrelations. Importantly, it acts as a site of antagonism, an elaborately crafteddispositif of displacement and terror in which Africa and anti-blackness is


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the inert matter that sutures and orders sexual intimacies, trade, reproductionof social value, and makes possible a flight away from the anarchic plurality oferotic expression towards the higher realm of the universal, the eternal one, thealways shifting socius seeking flesh to source the jouissance of having slaugh-tered the other instead of having been slaughtered.

This configuration of value as privilege sutures the international order in theform of multiple-world-value projects. For instance, within (Western) foreignpolicy, queerness maintains a futurity in the global social order that blacknesscannot. It is simultaneously a futurity that invests in motherhood (the relation-ality of a child and a mother; empathic labour by taking care of one’s kin;same-sex marriage) and one whose bases are the regenerative capacity pro-cured through transactional relations and risky ventures. The futurity of thisnew speculative economy is predicated not only on loss and segregation ofqueerness as speculation from other sexualities, but also on the suturing ofeconomies of blackness and terror perpetrated on black flesh. In Edelman’swork, queerness and not wanting to procreate is connected to a non-futurism(2004: 58) that presumes a split between motherhood as subject position(Gumbs 2010) and forced mothering ‘to arrive at queer definitions of mother-ing . . . not linked to the reproduction of an heteropatriarchal family unit’(Gumbs 2010: 56). While Edelman forces us to think of the relation as oneof temporality, his analogy shows that the reproduction of the global orderstill depends on conflict to alter and structurally adjust the racialized other(i.e., a profitable lack), and on terror and antagonism to disfigure Africa, theblack, the inert matter, flesh which does not register in the order of the onto-logically living and, yet, is captured, or eaten by the other in order to regen-erate power, capital and ‘free’ ‘radical’ life.

CONCLUSION

In saving the queer from the ‘African’ and the slave, the leadership of imperi-alism engages in a reconstruction of the new neoliberal entrepreneurial selfthat requires more than biopolitics: the US and certain European states turnagainst the populations that rupture their attempts to reconstruct a necro-economic-political order whose foundations depend on sustaining a materialand metaphorical matrix and mobilizing militias to eliminate ‘white but notquite’ (Agathangelou 2004) queer corporealities.

A conjunction and tracing of the tensions in the debates of queer theory andtheories of necropolitics and blackness highlight that ‘queer subjects [are]intelligible from within different systems of valuation’, punctuating ‘[a] tem-porality of a present sense of political possibility’ (Keeling 2009: 569). In Clin-ton’s speech and the Human Rights Report, queerness is the secret possessor ofa commitment to a capacity, whose suturing and forms of futurity depend onexperimentation and slaughtering as modes of surplus value (i.e., profits) gen-eration: queer sexuality finds itself transcending towards the higher realm of a


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universal subject by colluding in the erection and reconstruction of terrorstructures. Such a reconstruction is ultimately death.

It is only possible to see this relationship between queerness and death, thisanatomization of the violence and terror, by recognizing the interplay betweenrace and sex as productive of (and a product of) market activity, financialspeculation and liquidity as well as the changing vision of the future aroundwhich leaders speculate and plan. The importance of queerness is not that itenters at the limits of race, as Foucault has claimed, or the death drive asEdelman argues. Rather, the way queers are constituted through the US leader-ship as flexible corporeality makes them simultaneously a commodity and atechnology, whose value lies in imperial aims that draw on the queer as theentrepreneurial self to mark the US as the most progressive site of legal pro-gress and human rights facilitating the structural adjustment of racializedgays and lesbians into an entrepreneurial matrix of capital in Iraq and conti-nents like Africa.

Both the restructuring of ‘homo’ sexuality as a radical queer subjectivityof value and queerness as a speculative economy may enable the incorpor-ation and leverage of some in the struggle for human rights and equal citi-zenship. This move though is an ontological turn away from democracythat happens in a specific way. It is a move that depends on the fungibilityof racialized and queer subjects while necessitating violence against racia-lized subjects and fungibility as terror and slaughtering of the slave. Fur-thermore, using the queer as the proxy for a racially adjusted forwardsubsidy carries forward slavery’s chattel’s events, discussions and practicesinto the ‘now’ and the future. In conversations with diverse archives ofworld-value-making-projects the displacement of racialized gays and les-bians (beyond the visible transgression of queerness) becomes visible.These archives erase fungibility as terror. Conjuncting this fungibilitywith the one that erects value as form highlights how the particular andall-encompassing ethico-political and economic character of capital isvalue, ‘[an] explanan of all other entities’ (Bryant 2011: 131). Thiserasure is a dominant fallacy, a ‘difference that makes all the difference’(Bryant 2011: 131).

In the end, the only means of object relations – of entry into civil society,history and temporality – still depends on fungibility as slaughter enactedwithin structures of violence that hold Africa, blackness and queer blacknessat bay. The new call for ‘queer legal protections’, ‘human rights norms’ and‘gay rights’ is an example of speculation in freedom, whereby bodies andstates are turned into experiments and literally made to die in the nameof a queer freedom, even as this process of experimenting and dyingconstitutes value-added capacity. In sum, in a fungible order, queernessas freedom is a fantasia of and a strategy of bodily and spatialcapture. This techno-neo-imperial and military fantasia demands a deterri-torialization and reterritorialization of bodies, states, matters, inert mattersand energies; this catalyzes massive bodily productions, both living and


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dead, out of which flexible sustainable topographies, bodies and intimaciesmay emerge.

Anna M. AgathangelouYork University

S 653 Ross Building4700 Keele Street

Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, CanadaEmail: [email protected]

Notes

1 Economies of blackness, as I articulate it here, is a ‘forestructure of inquiry’ simul-

taneously an oppositional socio-onto-spatio-temporal framework that analyzes and

describes the processes/spaces constituted by and through socially situated beings.

The framework of economies of blackness allows us to trace this violence by looking

at the conjunction of different material sites such as ecology (i.e., land), body, and

language to enable us to see how these spaces remain subject to ‘primitive’ accumu-

lation and exploitation, on the one hand, and on the other, remain charged spaces of

struggle against neocolonial imperialisms and their different kinds of penetrations

and extractions (Agathangelou 2009: 189).

2 This assault highlights that capital fundament condition is theft, the wresting of

communities of their insurgent erotic energies oscillating between ‘euphoric specu-

lation and austere refoundation’ (Cooper 2012: 656) with slavery as its pivot.

3 Analogizing is an imperial strategy of erasure, property, mystification, displace-

ment, literal dispossession, and fungible violence that enables capital to capture

as well as generate in unexpected ways ’hidden’ patterns anew. Dayan problema-

tizes analogies in law and she states: ‘legal language makes possible such a compul-

sion for analogy; its choice of images, its reiterated terms and punishing effects. It is

through the law that persons gain or lose definition, become victims of discrimi-

nation or inheritors of privilege’ (Dayan 2011: 246).

Acknowledgements

My special thanks go to the two anonymous reviewers, Jin Haritaworn, AdiKuntsman, Silvia Posocco, Kyle D. Killian and Elizabeth Thompson for theirhelpful feedback.

Notes on contributor

Anna M. Agathangelou teaches in Political Science and Social and PoliticalThought at York University, Toronto, and is co-director of Global Change Insti-tute, Nicosia. She is the author of The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire,


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Violence and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation-States (Palgrave/Macmillan,2004) and co-author with L.H.M. Ling of Transforming World Politics: FromEmpire to Multiple Worlds (Routledge, 2009).

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